This episode takes you behind the scenes of where your seeds come from. We visit one of our organic seed partners at their seed farm and processing facility in Northern California. You'll see how a single seed crop takes months of planning, hand-weeding, and careful harvesting before it's washed, dried, milled, and lab-tested for purity and germination.
Robb Baumann, organic seed farmer, explains why losing plant diversity means losing our ability to grow organic at all, and why partners like Back to the Roots help make organic seed possible at scale. Patty Buskirk, a plant breeder, walks us through the quality control trials and clears up one of gardening's biggest myths about hybrid seeds. And Ariana, who runs seed production, takes us inside the mill where every seed gets sorted by size and weight before it's packed.
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Back to the Roots: https://backtotheroots.com
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Nikhil's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aroranikhil
[00:00:00] Alejandro Vélez: Every Back to the Roots seed packet starts somewhere. Today, in northern California with our seed partners to see exactly where. You'll follow a seed through its whole life, planned years ahead, grown and hand-weeded organically, harvested, washed, dried, milled, tested, and packed. Along the way, we'll hear why organic matters, why hybrids aren't GMOs, and how every packet you grow helps put more acres into organic farming. Let's get to the roots.
[00:00:47] Robb Baumann: Most people have grown organic, right? We didn't have big chemicals. That all came in really after World War II, did we start using synthetic chemicals and other things, right? So it's the way most people normally grow, and that's what the plant diversity originally was built around. And I think if you look at most home users, while you can buy chemicals these days for home use, most of what big ag is using is not even available to the average home consumer.
The food that, that we really should be eating, that we really are growing is, is organic, and we need the plant diversity that thrives in that kind of environment, not the one dependent upon a whole chemical cocktail to work. That may work well for big ag, but for the home consumer, it's not a sustainable long-term option for people to mix crazy chemical baths to put on their produce and to grow their product.
I think the important thing to think about with organic is that if we lose the diversity of plants that thrive in an organic setting, we lose our ability to have organic. If we let all the diversity of plant life move to one that's dependent upon a certain chemical protocol to thrive and survive, then we're, we lose this diversity.
We lose the plants that can thrive on their own without the chemicals, without the ad- additives, and then we have no choice. By having it now, we at least have a choice, and those who want that option can have that option, as long as we keep that plant diversity alive. And once we lose that, we lose it.
It's gone. So it's important. Back to the Roots has been really important for us, just as another person dedicated to organic. It's, organic's expensive. O- organic is difficult. It is not for large-scale production. There's a reason people move to chemicals, and to synthetics, and to different ways of processing, because it saves a lot of labor.
It's much more efficient. There's no question about it. But for us that are dedicated to it, it's necessary to have at least enough volume to be able to entice somebody to dedicate acres of farmland to organic production, which is timely, expensive, and they frankly could make more money using big ag processing.
So we need people dedicated to the cause to help us have the volume that we need to be able to produce at scale. And they're also bringing customer awareness. Every person who picks up a Back to the Roots seed packet, and grows and tries an organic product, and tries to grow themselves, and has success with it, is potentially somebody who's gonna be dedicated to the cause and helping bring more organic production in the future, and that, that's what we need.
We need to keep people interested. We're seeing difficulty in some of our farmland, where right now some of the prices are really good for non-organic production, and we've gotta compete with that. And if we don't have people there to back it, we're not gonna be able to, to lease those properties, and to have that organic field that we need to be able to produce this.
And it's gonna be a problem. We're here in a zinnia field, so this is a good example. This takes months of planning. As you can see, we've got different colors planted all throughout. Just figuring out the ratio. This is gonna be for a mix that you guys will be selling, and so figuring out the right ratio of colors has all gotta be pre-planned.
We've gotta decide what the start date's gonna be, watch the weather. We've gotta lease the land that we're gonna use, get it prepped, get the fields ready, get the drip tape in, and then get everything planted. Then, as we're sitting here now, this is the glory days. Before we come through, we've gotta walk through the fields, and we do two things.
We're looking for weeds, which unfortunately, because we're organic, means we gotta hand-pull those suckers and get those out of here. Then we rogue the fields, looking for things that aren't what we're looking for, not true to type. This field's luckily fantastic. We really don't have much of that, but we might be looking for something that's, uh, you know, we have single blooms and double blooms here.
Maybe we would have something in here that we didn't like, or it was a little off type. All those plants would be pulled before harvest so that the seed doesn't get mixed. And then we plan the harvest date. We'll start looking at how well the seed heads are developing, how close they are to being ready for harvest.
When we feel the majority of the field is timed out and ready, we'll cut off all the watering and let the plant material, the greens, die down. Gives us less moisture in our combine, lets everything dry out a little bit better, so it makes it easier to process the seed. In this case, this field we'll probably combine since we're gonna make a mix.
All that seed material, all of this plant material will be brought up into a combine, and we'll run through different screens to separate out some of the plant material from the seed material. Then all that will be trucked up to our facility just north of here, and the mill operator will inspect all of the processed material and decide his setup for how he'll process that.
And we have multiple different ways of processing. Most of it'll probably go through both screening assemblies and gravity tables to separate out material from seed material. Then all of that will continue to go through the mill multiple times, different setups, until we get to the clean seed product.
That seed will then be sent to labs for testing, make sure that the purity's good, make sure the germination's good, the vigor's good. And if that testing all comes back well, then we'll package it up and send it to you guys. So that's the process in a nutshell. So this field is something we harvested just a couple days ago, and what you can see is this, just like our other fields here, this field we came out, did all the same steps.
We rogued everything, made sure all the fruit looked good. We pulled any weeds or any other things that would have been a problem, and then we cut the watering off maybe couple, a week, two weeks before we wanna harvest. All the plant material dries out. You can see just how dry that plant material got.
Right? That makes it much easier to harvest, much easier to receive the fruit. Then we'll come out, and we'll windrow everything. So we'll bring a windrower in here that'll heap all of the material up onto these rows. You can see right down the row how much material you've got there. Then our vine harvester comes in, pulls up all the vine and the material, brings it up to the top of the machine, mashes the fruit, right, drops it down in through basically like a trommel, like you would see on Gold Rush or something, right?
You got a spinning trommel with spray bars, and we set the screen size to the seed we're looking for, and the seed drops through, and then the material deposits out the back of the trommel, right, and drops on the ground here. And this will all get disked back in as green manure, green waste, help this field grow better.
But you can see just walking along how efficient and good these operators are at pulling up all the material. We have almost no seed left anywhere along this row. So they did an excellent job at collecting all of that seed. And it's a real, real art. You know, the guys that can really set up a machine are, are really good.
They do a great job. Question people always ask is, "What do you do with the fruit?" This is the sad part of the business. You know, to grow a seed, unfortunately what we do is we grow it to a state that you really wouldn't wanna eat it, right? We're growing it for the seed, not for the fruit. And so it's gonna be a little overripe, a little beyond what you would normally want.
And that fruit is unfortunately not really usable, not really tasty in most cases at the time you're harvesting it for the seed. Of course, when you grow it at home, you'll harvest it much sooner and much more prime time, and it'll be great stuff.
Interviewer: How long does it take to harvest a field?
[00:08:38] Robb Baumann: This probably took minutes or maybe three hours. Something like that. Yeah. If you're, you gotta set up. You've got all your bins and your outputs and all that stuff. Probably a crew of 10 guys, three hours. Look how plump those are. Those are nice, though. So then these, so this is different than, like, that's a dry-seeded material over there.
So that'll go straight from the combine. If the plant material's still a little wet, they may need to dry it down a little bit, but usually not. Usually we're gonna do that in the field. That's where it's cheapest and easiest. Get it dry, and it'll go in, and it'll go straight through the milling process.
But all this, all of our cucurbit and all of our vine crop are all wet seeded crops, right? So here we're coming in, we're mashing all that up. It's going into that trommel. There's water in there. There's all the mucosal coating on the seed. So all this then goes back to the facility, and it gets flumed and washed.
So we have to wash the seed first, and then we gotta separate off the, uh, some of the mucosal, some of this little membrane that's connected. All that's gotta be separated off through the wash process. Then it goes into dryers, and that'll be, the seed will be dried to an appropriate moisture content. And then once it's dried, then we can go through the milling process to get out any other little bits and bobs- sticks and twigs and rocks and to sort the things out. And you'll look at here, you're gonna have... This is a gr- actually a beauty. We've got almost all mature seed, right? But there's gonna be some immature seed in there, some pips, and some things that are less than mature. Like, some of these guys here might not like that. Might- some of that stuff we'll sort out through the washing process or through the milling process.
Goes through gravity tables and that to sort the heavy from the light and pull off the stuff that probably won't germinate well or won't be as healthy a stock, and all that gets separated out. 'Cause obviously we don't grow thousands of varieties every year. So we're constantly looking at our stock, looking at some stuff we have to grow almost every year, either because it's super popular, we move through a lot of volume, or the seed doesn't hold well, and so you have to grow it nonstop.
But a lot of crops will last many years really stably, right? So for those crops, we'll grow two to three years, right? So that's, the planning's starting on how long is this gonna last? Okay, we're gonna have to grow that in two years, so let's make sure we're planting the crop for that. And then it all depends on demand.
That's what really throws us off. Because people, especially when they come to this from a non-agricultural industry, they don't understand when they're like, "Well, you're out of stock. Well, can you get more? Where is that? Like, hurry up. Can you expedite it?" Mm-hmm. "Can we pay more?" No. That's right. Like, th- this is it.
Mother Nature's the factory. There's nothing we can do, right? And so we have to go with what we have. And there's other times as well, like this crop could wipe out on us, and we did everything we wanted. We did all the planning we could. Mother Nature didn't cooperate. Crop's gone. We have cases; unfortunately, they happen occasionally.
Everything looks good. We've grown it all year. We put all the money in the watering, the labor, the roguing, the harvesting, everything. Brought it to our facility. We're gonna mill it. Another harvester. Mill it. We clean it. And it doesn't germinate well, and you're out. Lost all of it. You lost not only the money and the crop, the time, the roguing, the milling.
Those are sad days. We just had a big crop last, early in the milling season, just didn't do well. It was really rainy when we had to harvest, and it came out of the field pretty wet, and we were worried about that. We had no 'cause there's nothing we could do. We waited and waited and waited, and it just stayed wet, and then we tried drying it down, and yeah, didn't work.
So lost everything. Yeah. Yeah. And organic's even more difficult 'cause it's more expensive. More susceptible. When you're dealing with a conventional crop, they, um, there are treatments and things that you can do to help mitigate some of those issues. But yeah, when it's organic, there's not a whole lot you can do.
You just have to roll with the punches, and that's a problem.
[00:13:06] Patty Buskirk: These are our grow-out trials. These are our quality control trials for basically what the seed production department did last year. And so we're checking them for trueness to type and basically seed quality, make sure they all look alike, and they're, they're, they- consistency... and they're labeled correctly in the warehouse.
Don't worry, when you're producing, you know, 100 different varieties in one field like this, things get mixed up. It's, to err is human. So I think we only saw one, didn't we, Rob? Yeah, we saw one did quite well. One tomato. Yeah. And then there was one pepper that I knew that we had lost our stock, and it's a specialty ornamental pepper; the stock seed wasn't very good.
And so, I mentioned, I talked to Ariana this morning, and I told her, I said, "Well, honey, you got some work to do on this line." Yes. I said, "You're gonna have to throw that away and start again." Yep. It's all good.
[00:13:55] Robb Baumann: So when you're really intentionally crossing things that they're maybe not as stable, what'll happen is, so just like that, say you find some rootstock that is really drought tolerant, and this one has really great flavor and yield.
And you cross the genetics on them, and you keep trying until you get one that has both the resistance and the great flavor. And then what happens though with those F1 hybrids is that it's like crossing up a poodle and, uh, you know, a retriever. We do this all the time, and you get this hybrid that you really like.
But that dog itself is not going to breed true another dog that looks just like it, right? You have to cross the poodle and the Labrador each time to get that dog. That's what happens with hybrids. And people misunderstand hybrids and think they're genetically modified and all that. No, it's just nature's crossing.
And what'll happen is if you save your seed from that, it's going to revert to one of the parent lines more than likely, right? It's gonna be more like the dad or more like the mom in many cases. And so a lot of people misconstrued that and thought, oh, people trying to keep people from saving their seeds.
It's just nature, right? It's just, that's how it works. You take a little bit after your mom, or you take a little bit more after your dad, and unless you have those same two parents all the time, you're not gonna have the same consistency. But a lot of things that become open-pollinated over time become stable, and they eventually get to a point where the seed itself does breed true to type and does create a plant that's consistent.
So that happens a lot. A lot of what we call heirloom today was a cross between two different varieties or two different types that, over time, became stable and over time became selected by us or by nature to survive and to be something we like.
[00:15:50] Ariana: So we have four mills in here. That means that's pretty much what I mean by mill for in here is that they're gonna be run over multiple screens to be sorted out by size. So the big one behind us here is the Symbria. This is my largest machine. It starts over here from the hopper, goes up, and it'll go through a multiple chain of screens down here, vibrating screens back and forth to get sized out.
Will come down around through this belt, and it'll go up, and there is a gravity table over there to get separated more by weight. So actual size and weight is what it gets separated by. Um, we run pretty much any of the big logs here, and Shirkur bits for the most part, since they're flat, so they can go through pretty easily and go through here pretty fast.
But the biggest thing is it takes, like, a day to clean down and to put in box. So running anything that's, like, under size thin, it's not really economical because you take a whole day to clean it down to go in. It takes up to a day.
[00:17:04] Alejandro Vélez: From a field in California to a warehouse in Utah to your garden, every seed has a long journey behind it, and every packet you grow helps keep organic farming alive. Now go grow something